Retail establishments are trying to become more efficient by applying different and innovative operating methods that help to increase their business's financial condition. One of the constantly pursued goals is the reduction of a customer's waiting time in a checkout line. Being able to speed up the flow of customers through a checkout station, or to reduce cost of a checkout transaction, is critical to the success of a retail business. An evolution of the store checkout process has caused replacement of manual price keying of each item being purchased, for the process of scanning the item. Today, the bar code readers are commonly used in commercial and retail environments. In a retail checkout transaction the consumer has to present all the items he(she) wants to purchase to the cashier at a checkout register. The cashier scans each item in the order in which it is presented to him. In addition, there may be an ID check if the customer is purchasing a restricted item, such as, but not limited to, alcohol or tobacco. The transaction is completed once all the items have been scanned, all the coupons have been accepted, the total costs have been calculated, and the consumer has paid for the items. Even though scanning all the items at a checkout register takes less time than manually entering each item description into the computer, the sequential presentation to a cashier of each individual purchase can still take a long time and create long lines of customers waiting to pay for their purchases. This can cause bottlenecks at the checkout stations, reduce throughput, make customers unhappy, and affect the financial condition of a retail establishment. Self-service checkout, or "self-checkout" is a new way of conducting a checkout transaction and is a rapidly growing application in the retail environment. In a self-checkout system, each customer, rather than the cashier, scans the bar codes on the items he is purchasing. Presently there exist two types of self-checkout systems.
In the first type of self-checkout system, scanning takes place at a checkout station. After selecting all the shopping items, a customer brings all the items to a checkout station. A checkout station comprises a scanner for reading the product bar codes and coupons, a weighing scale for verifying purchased item price, and a checkout terminal for generating the final bill and accepting payment. Once at the checkout station, the customer scans the bar codes on his purchases, instead of having a cashier scan his items. After all the purchases have been scanned and verified, the customer also scans any coupons he might have. The customer requests the final bill by selecting an appropriate button on the checkout terminal. In response to the customer's request, the total purchase price is displayed on the terminal screen and the bill is printed out. The customer tenders payment to the checkout terminal. The terminal can accept payments by any standard payment methods. Once the bill has been paid and the receipt has been issued, the self-checkout transaction is finished and the customer can leave the store.
This system has inherent problems. Even though the system reduces labor costs by not having the cashier scan each item at the checkout register, it does not reduce customer's checkout time. In fact, the system usually increases the time to checkout, because the consumers are not as experienced at scanning the products as the cashiers. Also, because product scanning does not take place until the customer completes his shopping item selection, the system does not provide the customer with the real-time item price information or the real-time total purchase price information. This lack of cost information during item selection affects consumer's shopping efficiency. Consumers may either underspend and not purchase all the needed items, or overspend and have to return some of the purchased products.
The second type of self-checkout system consists of a rack with portable scanning terminals. Price information for each item in the store is downloaded from the store's computer into the terminal's memory during a time when the system usage is low or the system is non-operational. Each customer receives one scanning terminal upon placing their ID or shopper loyalty card into a card reader (e.g., magnetic stripe reader or bar code reader) in the rack at the log-in station. While shopping, the customer uses the terminal to scan bar codes associated with his purchases. The terminal has two scan trigger keys: the plus trigger key and the minus trigger key. Each trigger enables the scanning module located inside the terminal. When the consumer wishes to add a product to the group of items he wants to purchase, he uses the add trigger key to scan the product bar code. This process adds the item to the consumer's purchased item list inside the terminal's memory. In case the customer decides to return one of the items previously added to the purchased item list, he scans the item bar code using the minus trigger key. This process deletes the product from the customer's purchase item list inside the terminal's memory. In each case the information regarding the scanned item is displayed on the terminal screen. This information may include the price of the returned item as well as the quantity of the item on the customer's buy list. The terminal also has a total key, which is used to display customer's total transaction costs based upon the prices stored in the terminal's memory. When the item selection has been completed, the customer places the scanning terminal back into the rack. The customer's shopping information, which has been stored in the scanning terminal's memory, is downloaded through the terminal rack to the store computer, where the customer's transaction file is created. A ticket having a bar code printed thereon, wherein the bar code is encoded with the address of the customer's transaction file inside the store computer, gets issued to the customer. The customer takes the ticket and proceeds to a checkout register. When the cashier scans the bar coded ticket, the transaction file is retrieved from the store computer. The store computer also determines the security verification measures that the customer will have to undergo at a checkout station. Those measures are determined based upon random probability function conditioned by the customer's scanning accuracy during the past self-checkout transactions and the content of the present transaction. In certain cases all of the customer's purchases may have to be re-scanned. After completion of the required security checks and acceptance of any coupons the customer might have, the final bill is calculated. The customer settles the bill by any standard payment method and leaves the store.
Although this approach offers many advantages over the previously described system, it still presents a few problems. There must be one scanning terminal available per each potential customer. The costs of investing in a large number of scanning terminals and in a number of terminal racks may be prohibitive for most retail establishments. Because the scanning terminal has a fixed amount of memory, the size of information that can be stored inside the terminal is limited. Also, the price information displayed after scanning each item may not be synchronized to the point of sale system database, because the product price might have changed from the time when it was downloaded into the terminal to the time when the product bar code was scanned. In addition, the customer must leave the scanning terminal at the store and can not take it home for personal use.